26th May 2005 Archive

The promise that space travel will one day become as cheap, as safe, and as mind-numbingly tedious as air travel will inspire millions of youngsters to dedicate their lives to science and engineering, SpaceShipOne Master and Commander Burt Rutan apparently believes.

The European Union has approved a €660,000 grant for FLOSSWorld, a two-year project to promote FLOSS collaboration involving 17 partners in 12 countries. The funding is part of the EU's 6th Framework Research programme.

Financial analysts like to second-guess the results of the firms they cover: it's a harmless sport - after all they are guided heavily by the firms - and they grab some press coverage into the bargain.

A massive collection of highly-skilled, dedicated, brave law enforcement officials managed yesterday to shut down a web site alleged to facilitate the illegal trade of the latest Star Wars movie and other content.

Digital rights activists are celebrating this week with the expiry of powers in the UK's Electronic Communications Act of 2000 that gave the Government the right to regulate companies selling encryption services.

SAS introduced a number of new point releases in March of this year, notably to its Enterprise Reporting and ETL (extract, transform and load) solutions. Many of the new features are, to a certain extent, catch-up capabilities, in the sense that SAS has been relatively late to become a serious general-purpose player in the ETL and conventional BI markets. For example, its Microsoft Office plug-in only now includes integration with PowerPoint as well as Word and Excel. Similarly, it is with the latest release that Web Report Studio supports rich text.

Today, Intel's officially released Pentium CPUs that offer both high clock speeds and dual-core loveliness, although you won't get both in one package. The Pentium 4 660, which is a 3.6GHz 'Prescott' chip with 2MB of L2 cache, will now be play second fiddle to the Pentium 4 670. All the same internals; just 200MHz faster and, obviously, more expensive. On the other hand, the near-£700 3.2GHz HyperThreading-capable Pentium Extreme Edition 840 gets a little brother. The Pentium D 820 runs in at 2.8GHz, is dual-core, but does not support HyperThreading. The end result is a dualie that comes in at a more palatable £200 or so. Which is better: high clock speed and HT (the 670) or relatively low MHz and two cores (the 830)? Are either of them worth it?

Visto's dominance of intellectual property in email push - and its willingness to enforce its legal rights - has seen Vodafone, and now Nextel, go with the "ConstantSynch" technology, rather than wait for Microsoft and Exchange to support this technique.

Tiscali UK will begin to migrate broadband punters in London onto its new unbundled platform from tomorrow. Those getting the local loop unbundling (LLU) treatment shouldn't notice much difference - not to start with anyhow.

Good news for radio hams: communications regulator Ofcom plans to replace annual amateur radio licences with a new electronic licence that lasts for life. The regulator says it is seeking a balance between maintaining regulatory control and reducing expensive and unnecessary bureaucracy.

UK government ministers gave a vote of confidence to the technology underpinning its controversial ID card scheme, as proposals for the national scheme were reintroduced in Parliament on Wednesday. The scheme will link personal information such as names and addresses to biometrics - a computer scan of a person's iris, face or fingerprint. From 2008, UK passport applicants will also receive an identity card, under plans outlined in the government's ID Card Bill.

When Rio launched the CE2100 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January, the internet was awash with excitement. As a 2.5GB hard drive-based player in a small casing and with 20 hours of playback, what was not to like? Despite that buzz, five months in the world of the gadget industry is a long, long time, writes Stuart Miles.

New Intel CEO Paul Otellini has flashed a level of marketing savvy unseen with his predecessor by making the unusual suggestion that consumers buy Apple's Mac computers if they wish to avoid immediate security risks.

The anticipated "web affiliate program" which Skype announced today didn't generate the stir here in Stockholm. Instead, a passionate plea to regulatory authorities was made by Niklas Zennström, asking them to regulate the incumbent carriers, not the newcomers.

The German government plans to record the biometric facial features of those present in stadiums during the World Cup in 2006. By comparing these features with images stored in a database, the police hope to identify potential hooligans. When the software recognises a suspicious person, security forces on location can immediately be alerted. The security plan was presented this week in Stuttgart by Germany's Interior Minister Otto Schily.

A new Belgian electronic ID card contains typos introduced purposely to confound potential fraudsters, Luc Vanneste, General Director Population and Institutions of the Belgian Home Office, proudly announced this week.

Cisco is advising users of its IP telephony kit to update their software following the discovery of a flaw that might allow hackers to mount denial of service attacks. The bug, involving flaws in the processing of maliciously crafted DNS (Domain Name System) packets, also affects some of Cisco's content networking and secure router products.

While the third update to Mac OS X, Panther, was an essential upgrade for Mac users, the fourth has presented Apple's marketeers with something of a challenge. The ritual that we call the annual OS upgrade is Apple's best publicity showcase after January MacWorld - a chance to remind the world that it doesn't just make iPods. And it's a sensible occasion to introduce major system wide updates. It's also an opportunity to charge rent - and a predictable revenue stream is something software vendors have longed for years. Microsoft, Oracle and Sun amongst them. But Microsoft's Licensing 6.0 scheme has flopped even amongst business customers, not least because enterprises are sceptical that the company can deliver the goods within the lifetime of the subscription.

Cisco has bought application optimisation start-up FineGround Networks for approximately $70m in cash and options. The deal, announced Thursday, is expected to close before the end of July 2005, subject to regulatory approvals.

Estonian president Arnold Ruutel has put the kybosh on plans to allow internet voting in the country, saying that the process needs to be made more secure. He called for a more thorough debate on the uniformity of elections and the reliability of voter identification.